When my sons were little- they were were around eight and nine years old- they were into the toys and fads of the times.

Nintendo.

At least that’s all I remember them being into.

But when they branched out they managed to do it with my stuff or our family cat.

One Summer my youngest son wrapped our cat up in a baby blanket and was carrying him around the apartment complex and telling people this was his baby brother ” Joe “.

When Julio got tired of playing with ” Joe ” he leaned down and let him run off into the bushes. A few minutes later I get a call from a neighbor who is hysterical because she said she just saw my son throw a baby under the bushes.

But by far the most entertaining moment that wasn’t funny at the time was

THE TIME MY SONS READ A BOOK THEY SHOULDN’T HAVE

I love horror novels, and when my sons were little the biggest reason I didn’t want them pulling those books off my shelf was that some were 1st Edition hardcovers.

But of course they eventually did and what I learned later was that my middle son was reading one of them out loud to my youngest son when they went to bed at night.

They were apparently reading the Exorcist.

They were nine and eight at the time.

One night me and Luis left our boys with a sitter and went to the movies.

When we came home and she said they went to bed on time and went to sleep right away, hadn’t made a peep all evening and right away the alarm bells went off and I went straight down the hall to their room.

I opened open the door and the door catches on something. I reach around and look down and it’s my copy of the Exorcist .

And there fast asleep in their sleeping bags in the middle of the floor circled by their stuffed animals are my sons.

They’re wearing their bicycle helmets and and they’ve got their Nerf swords locked in their hands and sleeping with them is our cat who looks up at me and hisses.

My brain at this point sort of overloads and I look at my book and the spine is broken and two of the pages are not quite ripped out of the book but they’re bent.

I guess you can’t throw an open book against a wall and not have it suffer some damage, right?

Damn, bought that book with my own money when I was only a few years older then they are now, it was one of my prized possessions ( no pun intended)

I left them like that and in the morning I go into their room and I’m going to launch into my ruined book and how it would not be ruined had they KEPT THEIR HANDS OFF OF MY STUFF.

Instead when I open my mouth what comes out is:

” Wake Up! The power of Christ Compels You!”

Once they stopped screaming and we peeled our very angry cat off of the curtains we had a chat about

NOT TOUCHING MY BOOKS.

I’ll be honest.

It was funny then, it’s funny now.

It should be noted though that I did not receive a Mother’s Day card that year.